Pragmatically important information as e.g. dialogue acts that describe the illocution of an utterance depend in traditional processing approaches on error prone syntactic/semantic processing. We present a statistically based method for dialogue act classification that has word strings as input. An experimental evaluation shows that this method can be successfully used to determine dialogue acts. The overall recognition rate in the experiments is in the range of 65%-67% for German test data, and 74% for an experiment with English dialogues.